LA Times Reporters Jump on the Coffin of 14-Yr-Old

Giordano: LA Times Reporters Jump on the Coffin
of 14-Year-Old Javier Cortés in Atenco to Invent an Untrue
Story

May 7, 2006 Please Distribute
Widely

Al Giordano reports from Mexico on the
astonishingly dishonest reporting from L.A. Times
correspondents Sam Enriquez and Carlos Martinez on the
government repression in Atenco:

"The yet-to-be-determined
body count of those killed, disappeared, beaten, raped and
imprisoned from the three-day police riot and house-
to-house round-up of dissidents in and near San Salvador
Atenco, Mexico, included the assassination, last
Wednesday, of a 14-year-old boy.

"Javier Cortés had been
pronounced dead that afternoon and, immediately, officials
from the government invented a myth designed to protect
the assassins - its police forces - and to assign blame,
instead, to protesting townspeople: They claimed that
Cortés' own neighbors, during a highway blockade, threw a
'firecracker' that killed him as he walked to his
grandfather's house. The state prosecutor then snarled
that he would bring homicide charges, too, against the
protest leaders.

"The autopsy results, when they were
finally released, proved the official story to be false: A
police bullet killed Javier Cortés.

"And two Los Angeles
Times reporters, Sam Enriquez and Carlos Martínez, knew it
- the news had already been published in Mexico - when
they filed a story about the boy's Friday funeral, published
on Saturday.

"The LA Timesmen knowingly chose to
withhold that fact from their newspapers' readers, while
inventing other claims that, a Narco News investigation
reveals, are baseless and malicious, which is to say, what
Enriquez and Martínez reported was knowingly false."

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